Originally Published 4/23/14

Within the first 5 minutes of the film we are brought into the grotesque world of the wolf, Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), as he snorts cocaine, throws a midget against a velcro target and makes millions in seconds. This is a film about shameless excess and loathsome men, but at the core, more than anything, this is a film about human nature and the world we live in. “The Wolf of Wall Street” is the best film of the year.

Leave it to Scorsese to make the craziest film from one of the craziest memoirs. Most people find it astonishing when they realize how old Scorsese is but I’m not, Scorsese has dedicated his life into film preservation. Most directors don’t even bother with that, Scorsese loves film and sure he’s not making as many films as for say when he was young but he loves the art and thats what keeps him going.

And in his most exuberant performance to date DiCaprio plays Jordan Belfort, a stockbroker who went from rags to riches by creating Stratton Oakmont and selling penny stocks to working-class investors. But he can’t just sell people stocks, no its not that easy, he has to rip his investors off by inflating the prices. Not only that but each employee in his company has enough drugs in their system to sterilize Africa for the next 10 years, and are all conveniently the senior vice presidents of Stratton Oakmont. All of them. That brings the grand total of damages to more then $1 Billion and Belfort getting a 2 year sentence and a $110 million fine.

Of-course the Wolf can’t accomplish all this without some friends, Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill), who seems to have teeth so white they could blind a lighthouse, approaches Belfort at a diner where he quits his job after seeing how much he could be making. Belfort also enlists “Rugrat” Nicky Koskoff (P.J. Byrne), “The Depraved Chinaman” Chester Ming (Kenneth Choi), Brad Bodnick (Jon Bernthal), Robbie Feinberg “Pinhead” (Brian Secca), Alden Kupferberg “Sea Otter” (Henry Zebrowski). And Belfort, after abandoning his first wife Teresa (Cristin Milioti), marries the blond blue-eyed goddess Naomi (Margot Robbie).

Belfort started out on Wall Street humbly with high ambitions but it was the lust for money that drove him to the point of doing those insane things. More is never enough, and he enjoys it; loves it.

Following “Goodfellas” and “Casino” the wolf starts in the middle-class of Queens and rises to extreme power and height of the elite on Long Island. The pace is best described by RogerEbert.com critic Matt Zoller Seitz who says that its essentially “the last thirty minutes of “GoodFellas” stretched out to three hours”. Rightfully so, and just like “Goodfellas”; “The Wolf Of Wall Street” is about our world and who we are.

Above all, “The Wolf Of Wall Street” is about the mentality of the world we live in where money is the controller. In the last shot of the film we see Belfort speaking to a crowd of people asking them if they can sell him a pen. Then the camera goes over all the faces as we see a wide variety of people in the crowd all anticipating and wanting to learn from Belfort. It may be one of the saddest shots I’ve seen, people go to these meetings to learn and seek advice from this monster that we’ve seen go berserk for 3 hours. But its not about Belfort, he’s just the vehicle that Scorsese uses in order to convey what he’s saying. Money is portrayed in this film as an addiction, and Scorsese is not just saying that this happens only on Wall Street, but that this is a universal addiction.

Don’t get the sense that the film is ever condoning the actions of the people portrayed though. The shots that Scorsese uses make you feel that Stratton Oakmont is nothing but frauds and gillies blaring uselessly into their black plastic boxes over and over again in a damp jungle.

Before writing the screenplay for the “The Wolf Of Wall Street”, Terence Winter, whose credits include “The Sopranos” and “Boardwalk Empire”, interviewed Jordan Belfort and the man who caught him Patrick Denham. Both of them revealed that everything that happened in Belfort’s memoir was true.

And Winter and Scorsese never keep the wolf under wraps, you get the whole ravenous picture. We get a thrill from watching men like Belfort because its part of human nature, just like you watch the news everyday and you see the disaster of a hurricane or a storm and can’t look away. So what does this say about our society? We don’t like men like Belfort but its men like him who represent us and in the end rob us blind. All of this is summed up in the last shots of the movie where, after watching it, everything made sense.

“The Wolf Of Wall Street” isn’t for everyone but it talks about everyone. Jordan Belfort is still making millions as a motivational speaker, but as I said the movie is not about him. Belfort still has his legal issues and problems, but this is all about that feeling deep down inside that if we had just a little bit more money all our problems would be gone.